The killer’s name was Charles and he sat across from me as casually as if we were out for a drink.
Right leg crossed over the left, hands resting comfortably on the arms of his chair. His face was marked with a fine mist of blood, remnants of the moment his knife sliced through his wife’s jugular vein. But it wasn’t the blood that put me uptight or that the crime was so recent his victim was still warm. It wasn’t even the eerie calm of his face. What I found truly unnerving were his eyes.
Charles had piercing, probing eyes that seared your skin. The kind of eyes that stare right through you. The kind of eyes, perhaps, that wouldn’t blink as he brutally murdered you. And they were a terrifying blue, a striking feature in whites, absolutely mesmerizing in a light-skinned black man like Charles.
As I took a seat across from him he smiled and said, “All the angels have been killed.”
I was brought there, left alone with Charles less than three hours after he stabbed his wife, by a detail you simply can’t invent. I have come to believe the reason truth is stranger than fiction is the details. Little things our sane and rational minds are unable to dream up.
Like, for instance, that stabbing someone is hard work. That no matter how strong you are or how enraged, even deranged, you are, it takes a lot of force to stick a knife into someone’s body. Sure there’s the not so insignificant detail of poking a sharp object into a moving target, but even once the knife makes entry there are things to contend with. Like bones. Bones are hard. And they’re everywhere. Even a sharp knife tends to stop when it hits something solid. A rib, for instance. Or a collar bone.
In Charles’ fury he stabbed his wife more than forty times. After two or three slices, the blood, now splattered across his face and soaking through his clothes, really began to flow. That made the knife slick enough that when he struck bone, the knife slipped. I’ll spare the squeamish the remaining details, but suffice it to say his fingers were deeply lacerated.
Which is why I was there. Atlanta homicide needed someone to stop the bleeding long enough for them to finish processing Charles. And so here I was. Sitting alone in an interview room with a man who had just slaughtered his wife.
I cleared my throat. “You want me to bandage those fingers for you?”
Charles barely glanced at them. “And the angels? They've all had blue eyes.”
Let me tell you, at that moment, just how uninterested I was in his fingers. “Oh?”
He nodded. “Yup. John Kennedy, November 22, 1963. Robert Kennedy, June 5, 1968. William McKinley, September 6, 1901. Abraham Lincoln, April 15, 1865. John Lennon, December 8, 1980.” He looked down at his hands. “Jesus Christ.”
“I don’t think Christ had blue eyes.”
He smiled at me. Then his face turned serious. “She used to look at me, stare at me. At my eyes.”
“Who?”
“The victim,” he said, a strange expression washing over him. Clearly this was the first time he had referred to his wife as The Victim and it affected him. The look wasn’t remorse or even hate, but surprise. As though he’d been waiting years for her to assume that title and now, finally, she’d achieved it.
“You can wrap my hands,” he said.
If you’ve never shared a ten-by-ten room with a killer, let me tell you now it’s a strange experience. But to have him ease his chair back from the table so you can stand over him and bandage the wounds he received while disemboweling his screaming wife, well...
I grabbed some gauze and walked around the table. He looked into my face and I tried with all my strength not to stare at his eyes. But it’s impossible. It’s like having a conversation with a girl whose enormous boobs are hanging out of her shirt. No matter how hard you try, now matter what you tell yourself, your eyes always wander back. As I bandaged his hands, still covered in his blood, her blood, the smell filling the room, all I could think was, “I’m next. He’s gonna catch me looking, assume I’m here to make him the next dead blue-eyed angel and he’s gonna strangle me.”
I wondered how long it would take a cop to hear my gurgled cries. I wondered how long it would take Charles to kill me. I wondered why the cops had left me in here alone for so long. I mean, this man had just murdered his wife and he was telling me, a paramedic, his reasoning was a strange and very real re-interpretation of the Telltale Heart.
When I finished I sat back down and smiled at Charles. Creepy as he was, this was the most interesting thing I’d done all week. He had started talking again, more paranoid lunatic rambling, when a new cop walked in. Without missing a beat, Charles said, “I know you.”
“Oh?”
“You’re Michael Winters.”
The cop stood motionless in the door as Charles played with the bandages.
“That’s my father,” the cop said. “How did you…” The cop, dumbfounded, looked at me, then back to Charles.
As it turns out, Detective Michael Winters had been the APD spokesman back in the early 80s when the infamous Atlanta murder spree involving Wayne Williams had been national news. He’d long-since retired and his son, then only a teenager, had since moved up in the ranks and was now the homicide detective standing before us. That Charles had recognized this man from news footage of his father that hadn’t aired in over twenty years sent chills down my spine.
Would Charles remember me? Would my child someday bump into this man, when Charles is old and infirmed and paroled because he’s no longer considered a threat? Would my child, not knowing his very real and dangerous connection with this man, stare unknowingly into those hypnotic blue eyes and rekindle Charles’ long-dormant homicidal delusions?
As my mind raced with endless and horrible possibilities, the detective took Charles by the arm and led him away. As he left, Charles turned around and smiled at me, his blue eyes burning their way through my skull.
“Thanks for the bandages,” he said. “I’ll see you later.”
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Strange Places
People live in strange places. This thought occurs to me as I stand in a friend’s bedroom looking over the remains of a life I hadn’t understood as well as I’d thought. The unmade bed, the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of books, the loaded .357 tucked under the pillow – these were all things I had expected to see. The rest, though, came as a surprise.
Just an hour ago I’d gotten a terrible, if expected, call. John was dead and his family was on the way. A friend wanted to know if I could go over and open a few windows, air out the smell of week-old death. ‘I can’t do it,’ he said, ‘but I’ll meet you there with a key.’
I drive in silence. Over the past month I’ve made this same drive a dozen times. I’d bring a few books; maybe some strange and terrible newspaper article I knew would tease out that savage smile. I’d knock on the door and, when John wouldn’t answer, leave the books on his porch. Later he’d sneak out, snatch what I’d left and disappear back inside. I like to think he read what I brought and it made things better but I can’t be sure. He was sick, sicker than we realized.
When I arrive I am given a key to the basement door. I walk around back past the overgrown bushes, the rusting car, the kudzu-covered canoe. I slip the key into the lock and, for the first time in my life, walk into my friend’s house.
I have been to strange places. One night I ran a stabbing at a crack motel, one of those ‘stay a night or stay forever’ tenements that literally breed weirdness. As we treated our patient a crowd gathered to watch, some laughing, others crying. A handful gazed upon us as indifferent and bored as a long line of customers at the post office. Into this bizarrely intimate moment – bathed in flashing emergency lights, populated by hookers, smelling of congealed blood, and framed by shadows teeming with coital moans and the amber glow of crack pipes – wandered an old man. He met my stare as he picked his way through and, without stopping, simply said ‘Strange place, brother. Strange place.’
My friend died in the basement. As soon as I walk in I see exactly where he fell. People never called upon to witness it assume the worst part of death is its smell. And, yes, the air down here is less than pleasant but it’s exactly what I expected. Truly arresting is what I see. A body left untended for even a few days leaves marks if not indelible, then at least unmistakable. The floor, not far from where I stand, is stained by the brown smudge of decomposition. It takes a second to process what I’m seeing and another to convince myself I can deal with it.
I try the basement light but it doesn’t work and I quickly realize why. My friend – the unrepentant gun-slinger who nearly shot himself twirling a .38, the snickering practical joker who once tricked Ted Turner, the voracious reader who rode the train to the airport just for the magazines, the staggering genius who abandoned his career at one of Atlanta’s most prestigious architectural firms to work in a hardware store – was living in the dark. There is no power. No gas. No running water. He survived on the skills of a lifelong Boy Scout and avid outdoorsman. But it’s winter and I’m freezing. In today’s world of wireless internet and multiple AC units, a house without power is not just off the grid, it’s barely a home.
Many times, always it seems in the dead of winter or smothering heat of summer, we’re called into abandoned houses reclaimed and parceled out by the homeless. They’re known as cat holes and you always know when you’re going to one because the call comes from a pay phone.
Sometimes, like John, the residents of these ghost towns aren’t homeless. Landlords who have decided to close down and raze an apartment complex will often vacate them one apartment at a time. This dooms the last tenant to a strange, post-apocalyptic world of boarded up windows and bashed-in doors. Finding a family living happily and quietly in the very back of an otherwise abandoned apartment complex, the contents of its gutted buildings littering the street, is spooky.
Sitting on the table are my friend’s cigarettes, his lighter, a pocket knife and the notebook in which he wrote the strange things he heard people say. His prized quote was ‘Sure be do is am.’ The place is a mess but that’s not surprising. Quick minds settle in cluttered spaces and, besides, the only truly clean place I’ve ever been is the Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta.
But this house is a different kind of messy. Partially-eaten meals and old food clutter the countertops. The walls are covered with scraps of paper upon which John had scribbled half-conceived ideas and fully realized delusions. The voice that calls out from the notes is not that of my ever-scheming but tender-hearted friend. The voice is angry, scared, confused and fanatical. Paranoia, rage and insanity charge the air like a live wire. In the coming weeks I will learn that his genius was accompanied by an unbalanced mind and when the pneumonia sapped his strength he simply stopped taking his medicine. The mind is the fountainhead of all human progress and when insanity is allowed to take hold, the world it creates is beyond terrifying.
John lived in his parents’ house. He was the oldest of the brothers and when his parents died he moved back in. Almost nothing remains of the house of John’s childhood except the front room. Where the rest of the place is scarred by horrors even friends and pharmacology were powerless to prevent, the front room exists today as, I suspect, it did when John was a child.
This isn’t unusual. Twice I was called out to an alcoholic, teetering on the edge and about to fall off, who avoided his living room. While the rest of the house was nothing but blood-stained walls and empty liquor bottles, the living room was lavishly decorated. Family members smiled down at him from carefully hung group pictures and none of the furniture had been pawned. This room was the only place where his former life lived on.
John had done the same thing. Over time he had slipped, one rung at a time, so slowly it was almost imperceptible, but this room survived. Somewhere in a deep pocket of his troubled mind was the man he had been. And this room, untouched, unlived in but carefully preserved, was the physical presence of that man’s fading memory.
As I walk around opening windows, I am nearly brought to tears by all the things I didn’t know: the missed signs, the missed opportunities, the private misery of someone I called a friend for so long but who, in the end, would die alone. In his bedroom I open one last window, thumb through a few books and unload his pistol. For all its insanity, its cluttered mess, its powerless, waterless squalor, its carefully preserved past and its slowly decomposing present, this house is the physical presence of John’s troubled but brilliant mind.
And believe me, it is a strange place, brother. Strange place.
Just an hour ago I’d gotten a terrible, if expected, call. John was dead and his family was on the way. A friend wanted to know if I could go over and open a few windows, air out the smell of week-old death. ‘I can’t do it,’ he said, ‘but I’ll meet you there with a key.’
I drive in silence. Over the past month I’ve made this same drive a dozen times. I’d bring a few books; maybe some strange and terrible newspaper article I knew would tease out that savage smile. I’d knock on the door and, when John wouldn’t answer, leave the books on his porch. Later he’d sneak out, snatch what I’d left and disappear back inside. I like to think he read what I brought and it made things better but I can’t be sure. He was sick, sicker than we realized.
When I arrive I am given a key to the basement door. I walk around back past the overgrown bushes, the rusting car, the kudzu-covered canoe. I slip the key into the lock and, for the first time in my life, walk into my friend’s house.
I have been to strange places. One night I ran a stabbing at a crack motel, one of those ‘stay a night or stay forever’ tenements that literally breed weirdness. As we treated our patient a crowd gathered to watch, some laughing, others crying. A handful gazed upon us as indifferent and bored as a long line of customers at the post office. Into this bizarrely intimate moment – bathed in flashing emergency lights, populated by hookers, smelling of congealed blood, and framed by shadows teeming with coital moans and the amber glow of crack pipes – wandered an old man. He met my stare as he picked his way through and, without stopping, simply said ‘Strange place, brother. Strange place.’
My friend died in the basement. As soon as I walk in I see exactly where he fell. People never called upon to witness it assume the worst part of death is its smell. And, yes, the air down here is less than pleasant but it’s exactly what I expected. Truly arresting is what I see. A body left untended for even a few days leaves marks if not indelible, then at least unmistakable. The floor, not far from where I stand, is stained by the brown smudge of decomposition. It takes a second to process what I’m seeing and another to convince myself I can deal with it.
I try the basement light but it doesn’t work and I quickly realize why. My friend – the unrepentant gun-slinger who nearly shot himself twirling a .38, the snickering practical joker who once tricked Ted Turner, the voracious reader who rode the train to the airport just for the magazines, the staggering genius who abandoned his career at one of Atlanta’s most prestigious architectural firms to work in a hardware store – was living in the dark. There is no power. No gas. No running water. He survived on the skills of a lifelong Boy Scout and avid outdoorsman. But it’s winter and I’m freezing. In today’s world of wireless internet and multiple AC units, a house without power is not just off the grid, it’s barely a home.
Many times, always it seems in the dead of winter or smothering heat of summer, we’re called into abandoned houses reclaimed and parceled out by the homeless. They’re known as cat holes and you always know when you’re going to one because the call comes from a pay phone.
Sometimes, like John, the residents of these ghost towns aren’t homeless. Landlords who have decided to close down and raze an apartment complex will often vacate them one apartment at a time. This dooms the last tenant to a strange, post-apocalyptic world of boarded up windows and bashed-in doors. Finding a family living happily and quietly in the very back of an otherwise abandoned apartment complex, the contents of its gutted buildings littering the street, is spooky.
Sitting on the table are my friend’s cigarettes, his lighter, a pocket knife and the notebook in which he wrote the strange things he heard people say. His prized quote was ‘Sure be do is am.’ The place is a mess but that’s not surprising. Quick minds settle in cluttered spaces and, besides, the only truly clean place I’ve ever been is the Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta.
But this house is a different kind of messy. Partially-eaten meals and old food clutter the countertops. The walls are covered with scraps of paper upon which John had scribbled half-conceived ideas and fully realized delusions. The voice that calls out from the notes is not that of my ever-scheming but tender-hearted friend. The voice is angry, scared, confused and fanatical. Paranoia, rage and insanity charge the air like a live wire. In the coming weeks I will learn that his genius was accompanied by an unbalanced mind and when the pneumonia sapped his strength he simply stopped taking his medicine. The mind is the fountainhead of all human progress and when insanity is allowed to take hold, the world it creates is beyond terrifying.
John lived in his parents’ house. He was the oldest of the brothers and when his parents died he moved back in. Almost nothing remains of the house of John’s childhood except the front room. Where the rest of the place is scarred by horrors even friends and pharmacology were powerless to prevent, the front room exists today as, I suspect, it did when John was a child.
This isn’t unusual. Twice I was called out to an alcoholic, teetering on the edge and about to fall off, who avoided his living room. While the rest of the house was nothing but blood-stained walls and empty liquor bottles, the living room was lavishly decorated. Family members smiled down at him from carefully hung group pictures and none of the furniture had been pawned. This room was the only place where his former life lived on.
John had done the same thing. Over time he had slipped, one rung at a time, so slowly it was almost imperceptible, but this room survived. Somewhere in a deep pocket of his troubled mind was the man he had been. And this room, untouched, unlived in but carefully preserved, was the physical presence of that man’s fading memory.
As I walk around opening windows, I am nearly brought to tears by all the things I didn’t know: the missed signs, the missed opportunities, the private misery of someone I called a friend for so long but who, in the end, would die alone. In his bedroom I open one last window, thumb through a few books and unload his pistol. For all its insanity, its cluttered mess, its powerless, waterless squalor, its carefully preserved past and its slowly decomposing present, this house is the physical presence of John’s troubled but brilliant mind.
And believe me, it is a strange place, brother. Strange place.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Finding the Dead
When it comes down to it, late afternoon is as good a time as any to find the dead. The air is slowly making its transformation from humid afternoon sweat to cool evening breeze, the streets growing quiet as the world settles in for the night. The end of day, the beginning of a long dark night. It would appear, perhaps, this transition carries with it some symbolic parallel to the journey our patient has just made but the reality is no more poetic than this: I simply find this time of day relaxing.
Right now we’re headed to an abandoned school in southeast Atlanta. There’s a cop down there who thinks he’s found something but can’t be sure.
Cool air sweeps through the cab of the ambulance as we ease our way south. I have gotten this call too many times to count. Someone is down, no one knows who or how or why. Simply that they saw something, or didn’t. Sometimes the eyes play tricks. In the movies they call it DOA for dead on arrival. Officially we call it a 48, ten code for dead. Unofficially, well, a lot of things are said. DRT: Dead Right There. I once heard someone say NLPR, which means No Longer Playing Records. These have always struck me as a touch cheesy. Usually I'll wander outside and tell the fire crew that’s hustling in behind us ‘Hey you guys can take off. He’s already stiff.’ Or, to the concerned rookie cop who’s never worked a 48 and isn’t sure how to react, I’ll say ‘Just call the ME, you can smell him from the door.’ Back inside, my partner and I will dig through his pockets and rifle through his drawers looking for ID, for meds, for clues to what might’ve happened. We’ll speculate on how long he’s been here, whether he fell going to or coming from the bathroom. One way or another we’ll all be present for this conversation someday.
When we pull up to the school there’s a traffic patrol officer parked on the curb. There are so many police agencies, each with dozens of sub-sets, to list even a fraction of those prowling our streets right now would make your head spin. After six years I still find new ones and today, as we pull-up on scene, the Atlanta Traffic Enforcement truck is new to me. A fat guy lumbers out of the passenger seat and tells me he was driving by when a junkie flagged him down and said there was someone inside. He tried to investigate but didn’t have a flashlight. So he called us.
It been years since the school was full of children. Its power has been cut, the windows boarded up. But it’s definitely still in use. Like the junkies, whores and lunatics who fill its classrooms today, we slip through a hole in the chain-link fence and cross the schoolyard on a well-worn path through the weeds. Finding a body in a place like this has advantages, first among them the near-certain guarantee that whoever lies inside will not be tended to by a crowd of anxious loved ones.
Usually we find them in houses. Always upstairs, always in a tiny room. The sick and dying tend to know something is wrong and, if they can, they make their way to the bathroom. I’ve seen countless bodies, stiff and swelling, pinned between the toilet and the tub. Even when they’re in the bedroom or the kitchen the bathroom light is on, the medicine cabinet open and pawed through. By the time we’re called no one has spoken with him in days and a son or daughter has come to check on him. Usually they get no closer than the front door when their worst fears are confirmed. Once a woman rotted in her stifling hot apartment for two weeks before someone finally called. As we walked around, faces covered with towels, her neighbors were so ashamed they wouldn’t meet our eyes. ‘I just thought it was a rat in the wall,’ one woman told me. The smell was drifting out into the street and I asked her how big a rat did she think it was. She shook her head, embarrassed, then went back inside and locked her door.
Sometimes, though, the family is home. A man feels ill, lies down in bed and never gets up. Two hours later his wife goes to check on him and notices his feet are blue. Occasionally a family wakes to find their infant cold and stiff in her crib. Overcome with emotion, they are frantic, violent and totally inconsolable. One cold morning I stood in a trailer park and informed a Spanish-speaking family of their infant’s death through the only available translator: their nine-year-old niece.
As soon as we enter the school we are swallowed by darkness. An abandoned building is creepy to begin with but when you know your journey will end with a dead body it takes on a life of its own. I click on my flashlight and am amazed at its uselessness. This beam of light is my lifeline, what I will use to get to the patient and, eventually, what I’ll use to get out again. And it’s only 12 inches wide. Somewhere in the darkness something moves and I swing my light. I hope to God it’s only a rat but I know we’re not alone in here.
We shuffle through the auditorium, stepping over fallen pieces of ceiling and piles of turd that dot the floor like a dysenteric mine field. As we go deeper in things get much worse. We’re in a hallway now, dark as night and shockingly narrow. The plaster ceiling sags and buckles with water damage, long strips hanging down like fly paper. I jump out of my shoes every time I bump into one. And the walls. Also plaster, they heave forward, lumpy shapeless arms reaching out to grab me as I stumble forward, tripping over debris.
And all the while I can’t see. Cup your hands tightly over your eyes and you begin to imagine what our field of vision is. A tiny dot in the darkness. I look left and can’t see what’s coming from my right. Look forward and have no idea what lurks behind me. And all the while the place is alive with groans and creaks, the distant moaning of a drug-crazed lunatic, himself not far from death.
We round another corner and for the first time we catch a whiff of what lies ahead. Decomposition is a terrible, sickly sweet smell but at least today it tells us we’re on the right path. Our trail will end down the next hall. When we round the corner we’re blinded by a flash of light and immediately stop. Disoriented from stumbling through the darkness it takes a minute for me to realize what I’m looking at: the door at the end of the hall is half glass, my light is bouncing off and shining back in our eyes.
We continue on, the smell becoming more intense with each step and the cop beside me, a traffic enforcement officer after all, begins to mumble. Five feet from the door he says he’s never seen a dead body. ‘Well, I guess you can check that one off your list,’ I tell him. When I reach the glass the smell is over-powering. It’s been more than a week, possibly two. I have to place my light on the glass to cut back on the reflection. What’s on the other side is Hollywood. A man in the fetal position, guarded by flies, tended to by maggots. Large sections that should be there simply aren’t. When a body is left untended words we do not normally associate with humans begin to apply: bloating, liquefying, bursting, rotting. These have all happened. It’s the ultimate lesson in humility. We are nothing more than meat and, if circumstances allow, we will end up no differently than a possum lying on the side of the road.
The cop groans and twitches, this is more than he bargained for. I’ve seen all I need to see and step back. To keep the light from reflecting off the glass and shining in my eyes I point it at the ground. And there, at my feet, are drag marks.
It takes a second for my brain to process this information but once it does there is a tingle at the base of my spine. Slowly, I trace them down the hall, back the way we’ve just come. ‘Um’ is all I manage to say. It turns out our patient didn’t slink back here to die in peace. He was dragged, perhaps kicking and screaming, to this dark corner of a long abandoned building and killed. The cop sees what I see. He fidgets with his keys. ‘You might wanna go ahead and call homicide,’ I say.
Outside it is bright. We have spent so much time scratching through the bowels of that building that even the fading light of day is intense in comparison. I write up a short report and have the traffic enforcement cop sign it. He is still shaken, his skin itching all over and his jaw hits the floor when he sees my partner take a bite of his dinner. He lingers just long enough for a beat cop to arrive before disappearing down the road, off to write tickets and reveling, no doubt, in the mundane nature of traffic enforcement.
We disappear, too. A mile down the road we get another call. A child with a fever. He plays with his mother’s keys as we drive to the hospital. His mother, seat-belted into the bench seat, looks around at the assortment of equipment we carry and says, ‘I bet y’all see some crazy stuff, huh?’ I keep writing, shrug. ‘It has its moments.’
Right now we’re headed to an abandoned school in southeast Atlanta. There’s a cop down there who thinks he’s found something but can’t be sure.
Cool air sweeps through the cab of the ambulance as we ease our way south. I have gotten this call too many times to count. Someone is down, no one knows who or how or why. Simply that they saw something, or didn’t. Sometimes the eyes play tricks. In the movies they call it DOA for dead on arrival. Officially we call it a 48, ten code for dead. Unofficially, well, a lot of things are said. DRT: Dead Right There. I once heard someone say NLPR, which means No Longer Playing Records. These have always struck me as a touch cheesy. Usually I'll wander outside and tell the fire crew that’s hustling in behind us ‘Hey you guys can take off. He’s already stiff.’ Or, to the concerned rookie cop who’s never worked a 48 and isn’t sure how to react, I’ll say ‘Just call the ME, you can smell him from the door.’ Back inside, my partner and I will dig through his pockets and rifle through his drawers looking for ID, for meds, for clues to what might’ve happened. We’ll speculate on how long he’s been here, whether he fell going to or coming from the bathroom. One way or another we’ll all be present for this conversation someday.
When we pull up to the school there’s a traffic patrol officer parked on the curb. There are so many police agencies, each with dozens of sub-sets, to list even a fraction of those prowling our streets right now would make your head spin. After six years I still find new ones and today, as we pull-up on scene, the Atlanta Traffic Enforcement truck is new to me. A fat guy lumbers out of the passenger seat and tells me he was driving by when a junkie flagged him down and said there was someone inside. He tried to investigate but didn’t have a flashlight. So he called us.
It been years since the school was full of children. Its power has been cut, the windows boarded up. But it’s definitely still in use. Like the junkies, whores and lunatics who fill its classrooms today, we slip through a hole in the chain-link fence and cross the schoolyard on a well-worn path through the weeds. Finding a body in a place like this has advantages, first among them the near-certain guarantee that whoever lies inside will not be tended to by a crowd of anxious loved ones.
Usually we find them in houses. Always upstairs, always in a tiny room. The sick and dying tend to know something is wrong and, if they can, they make their way to the bathroom. I’ve seen countless bodies, stiff and swelling, pinned between the toilet and the tub. Even when they’re in the bedroom or the kitchen the bathroom light is on, the medicine cabinet open and pawed through. By the time we’re called no one has spoken with him in days and a son or daughter has come to check on him. Usually they get no closer than the front door when their worst fears are confirmed. Once a woman rotted in her stifling hot apartment for two weeks before someone finally called. As we walked around, faces covered with towels, her neighbors were so ashamed they wouldn’t meet our eyes. ‘I just thought it was a rat in the wall,’ one woman told me. The smell was drifting out into the street and I asked her how big a rat did she think it was. She shook her head, embarrassed, then went back inside and locked her door.
Sometimes, though, the family is home. A man feels ill, lies down in bed and never gets up. Two hours later his wife goes to check on him and notices his feet are blue. Occasionally a family wakes to find their infant cold and stiff in her crib. Overcome with emotion, they are frantic, violent and totally inconsolable. One cold morning I stood in a trailer park and informed a Spanish-speaking family of their infant’s death through the only available translator: their nine-year-old niece.
As soon as we enter the school we are swallowed by darkness. An abandoned building is creepy to begin with but when you know your journey will end with a dead body it takes on a life of its own. I click on my flashlight and am amazed at its uselessness. This beam of light is my lifeline, what I will use to get to the patient and, eventually, what I’ll use to get out again. And it’s only 12 inches wide. Somewhere in the darkness something moves and I swing my light. I hope to God it’s only a rat but I know we’re not alone in here.
We shuffle through the auditorium, stepping over fallen pieces of ceiling and piles of turd that dot the floor like a dysenteric mine field. As we go deeper in things get much worse. We’re in a hallway now, dark as night and shockingly narrow. The plaster ceiling sags and buckles with water damage, long strips hanging down like fly paper. I jump out of my shoes every time I bump into one. And the walls. Also plaster, they heave forward, lumpy shapeless arms reaching out to grab me as I stumble forward, tripping over debris.
And all the while I can’t see. Cup your hands tightly over your eyes and you begin to imagine what our field of vision is. A tiny dot in the darkness. I look left and can’t see what’s coming from my right. Look forward and have no idea what lurks behind me. And all the while the place is alive with groans and creaks, the distant moaning of a drug-crazed lunatic, himself not far from death.
We round another corner and for the first time we catch a whiff of what lies ahead. Decomposition is a terrible, sickly sweet smell but at least today it tells us we’re on the right path. Our trail will end down the next hall. When we round the corner we’re blinded by a flash of light and immediately stop. Disoriented from stumbling through the darkness it takes a minute for me to realize what I’m looking at: the door at the end of the hall is half glass, my light is bouncing off and shining back in our eyes.
We continue on, the smell becoming more intense with each step and the cop beside me, a traffic enforcement officer after all, begins to mumble. Five feet from the door he says he’s never seen a dead body. ‘Well, I guess you can check that one off your list,’ I tell him. When I reach the glass the smell is over-powering. It’s been more than a week, possibly two. I have to place my light on the glass to cut back on the reflection. What’s on the other side is Hollywood. A man in the fetal position, guarded by flies, tended to by maggots. Large sections that should be there simply aren’t. When a body is left untended words we do not normally associate with humans begin to apply: bloating, liquefying, bursting, rotting. These have all happened. It’s the ultimate lesson in humility. We are nothing more than meat and, if circumstances allow, we will end up no differently than a possum lying on the side of the road.
The cop groans and twitches, this is more than he bargained for. I’ve seen all I need to see and step back. To keep the light from reflecting off the glass and shining in my eyes I point it at the ground. And there, at my feet, are drag marks.
It takes a second for my brain to process this information but once it does there is a tingle at the base of my spine. Slowly, I trace them down the hall, back the way we’ve just come. ‘Um’ is all I manage to say. It turns out our patient didn’t slink back here to die in peace. He was dragged, perhaps kicking and screaming, to this dark corner of a long abandoned building and killed. The cop sees what I see. He fidgets with his keys. ‘You might wanna go ahead and call homicide,’ I say.
Outside it is bright. We have spent so much time scratching through the bowels of that building that even the fading light of day is intense in comparison. I write up a short report and have the traffic enforcement cop sign it. He is still shaken, his skin itching all over and his jaw hits the floor when he sees my partner take a bite of his dinner. He lingers just long enough for a beat cop to arrive before disappearing down the road, off to write tickets and reveling, no doubt, in the mundane nature of traffic enforcement.
We disappear, too. A mile down the road we get another call. A child with a fever. He plays with his mother’s keys as we drive to the hospital. His mother, seat-belted into the bench seat, looks around at the assortment of equipment we carry and says, ‘I bet y’all see some crazy stuff, huh?’ I keep writing, shrug. ‘It has its moments.’
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Friday Morning
It’s Friday morning. That’s not nearly as succinct or accurate a description as it sounds. My Friday is not your Friday. Not necessarily. My forty-hour week is crammed into three days, the last of which is Friday, regardless of what calendar day it falls on. It’s also not necessarily morning. When you work nights whatever time you crawl out of bed, brain wobbling in the confused orange glow of mid-afternoon, that’s morning.
I take a shower, make some coffee and call my wife. Say what you will but I am quite simply lost at sea when she doesn’t answer. That isn’t to say I’m incapable of running the house in her absence. I’m the cook, the housekeeper, the gardener, shopper, unskilled laborer and arbiter of neighborhood disputes. I simply don’t care to start my day without first talking to her. Which is strange because when I call, her day is almost over. It’s after five and she’s worn down from solving petty disagreements, stomaching excuses and weathering an unending storm of accusations. In short, from straining under the burden managers the world over must carry. She’s tired from a long day and I’m fresh out of bed and ready to start mine. On days I work we are truly two ships passing in the night.
And it’s not just her. By the time I hop into my car the world is finished for the day, evidenced by the steadily increasing stream of cars heading in the opposite direction. They’re all going home for an evening of whatever it is they do and I’m still thinking about what to eat for breakfast. If nothing else, shift work teaches you the world is a window through which no two people will share the same view.
Of course, things are different on Monday. When you come in on Monday you’ve been gone from the place, washed it from your skin and returning is a shock to the system. On Monday the smell hits your nose like a jab and instantly triggers memories in a moment not at all unlike walking through the halls on the first day of school. By Friday that’s all gone and the smell is a part of you, your body coiled and ready to spring when the dispatch comes in. There is also, on Monday, a cleanliness. It’s in your boots, your clothes, your hands. Everything has been laundered and polished and left to rest. By Friday there will be dirt, mud, clay, flecks of blood, the grime of homeless shelters and back alleys, unswept dust from decrepit houses and the slight stickiness of the river of bodily fluids you have passed through in nursing homes, bathrooms and in the crowded din of countless trauma bays. You’ll scrub these stains. Wipe them off, hose them off, remove them from sight and yet they linger on. Imperceptible, perhaps, but present. And so when Friday is over and you’re done for the week, the stains follow you home only to be removed by the sandblaster that is time spent away from the siren.
By now my day is in full-swing. My partner and I are perfectly synched from spending two long shifts shoulder-to-shoulder wrestling drunks and carrying the large, naked and infirmed from their houses. We check-off the truck, fire up the engine and put ourselves in-service. The sky is slowly going dark blue and streetlights begin to flicker on. Somewhere out there our first patient of the night does not yet know they need an ambulance.
And maybe they don’t. Sometimes they call seeking advice, reassurance or even a quiet alternative to the city bus they typically ride. None of this may be proper in the strictest sense of when you should summon the service of an emergency ambulance but they are realities of the modern 911 system those of us who comprise it accept as fact.
At a gas station in a dangerous part of town I buy a bottle of water and am invited to cut in front of the long line of men waiting to buy lotto tickets. Outside my partner has the windows down and our radio works and the moon is slowly beginning to overtake the sun. It’s the perfect start to the night and, at the moment, all is quiet.
That won’t last. Tonight we will run non-stop. We will be spit at, argued with, vomited on and threatened. We will work the nightmare call we all know is out there yet never mention for fear of summoning it from the muck. Tonight we will sweat, our hearts pounding as our efforts fail and everything goes quickly to shit. Someone will die as we walk through the door and the family will blame our slow response. All hell will break loose in the ambulance and nothing will go according to plan and when we arrive at the hospital a doctor will shake his head, having no idea what we went through to achieve even the modest degree of order he has inherited. Later we will sit in the ambulance plagued with doubt, wondering how things could’ve gone better, wondering what our peers will say and what they might’ve done differently.
But right now we don’t know any of that. Right now all is good, the sky dark and peaceful. Right now it’s Friday morning.
I take a shower, make some coffee and call my wife. Say what you will but I am quite simply lost at sea when she doesn’t answer. That isn’t to say I’m incapable of running the house in her absence. I’m the cook, the housekeeper, the gardener, shopper, unskilled laborer and arbiter of neighborhood disputes. I simply don’t care to start my day without first talking to her. Which is strange because when I call, her day is almost over. It’s after five and she’s worn down from solving petty disagreements, stomaching excuses and weathering an unending storm of accusations. In short, from straining under the burden managers the world over must carry. She’s tired from a long day and I’m fresh out of bed and ready to start mine. On days I work we are truly two ships passing in the night.
And it’s not just her. By the time I hop into my car the world is finished for the day, evidenced by the steadily increasing stream of cars heading in the opposite direction. They’re all going home for an evening of whatever it is they do and I’m still thinking about what to eat for breakfast. If nothing else, shift work teaches you the world is a window through which no two people will share the same view.
Of course, things are different on Monday. When you come in on Monday you’ve been gone from the place, washed it from your skin and returning is a shock to the system. On Monday the smell hits your nose like a jab and instantly triggers memories in a moment not at all unlike walking through the halls on the first day of school. By Friday that’s all gone and the smell is a part of you, your body coiled and ready to spring when the dispatch comes in. There is also, on Monday, a cleanliness. It’s in your boots, your clothes, your hands. Everything has been laundered and polished and left to rest. By Friday there will be dirt, mud, clay, flecks of blood, the grime of homeless shelters and back alleys, unswept dust from decrepit houses and the slight stickiness of the river of bodily fluids you have passed through in nursing homes, bathrooms and in the crowded din of countless trauma bays. You’ll scrub these stains. Wipe them off, hose them off, remove them from sight and yet they linger on. Imperceptible, perhaps, but present. And so when Friday is over and you’re done for the week, the stains follow you home only to be removed by the sandblaster that is time spent away from the siren.
By now my day is in full-swing. My partner and I are perfectly synched from spending two long shifts shoulder-to-shoulder wrestling drunks and carrying the large, naked and infirmed from their houses. We check-off the truck, fire up the engine and put ourselves in-service. The sky is slowly going dark blue and streetlights begin to flicker on. Somewhere out there our first patient of the night does not yet know they need an ambulance.
And maybe they don’t. Sometimes they call seeking advice, reassurance or even a quiet alternative to the city bus they typically ride. None of this may be proper in the strictest sense of when you should summon the service of an emergency ambulance but they are realities of the modern 911 system those of us who comprise it accept as fact.
At a gas station in a dangerous part of town I buy a bottle of water and am invited to cut in front of the long line of men waiting to buy lotto tickets. Outside my partner has the windows down and our radio works and the moon is slowly beginning to overtake the sun. It’s the perfect start to the night and, at the moment, all is quiet.
That won’t last. Tonight we will run non-stop. We will be spit at, argued with, vomited on and threatened. We will work the nightmare call we all know is out there yet never mention for fear of summoning it from the muck. Tonight we will sweat, our hearts pounding as our efforts fail and everything goes quickly to shit. Someone will die as we walk through the door and the family will blame our slow response. All hell will break loose in the ambulance and nothing will go according to plan and when we arrive at the hospital a doctor will shake his head, having no idea what we went through to achieve even the modest degree of order he has inherited. Later we will sit in the ambulance plagued with doubt, wondering how things could’ve gone better, wondering what our peers will say and what they might’ve done differently.
But right now we don’t know any of that. Right now all is good, the sky dark and peaceful. Right now it’s Friday morning.
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